WHAT'S IN A NAME? 57 



which is found in Maynooth, Armagh, Magdeburg, and in French 

 names distorted by Latin writers as Rotomagus^ Rouen, Noio- 

 magus=Nemours ; but such names are only to be met with m East- 

 ern France. These tribes must have burst into Western Europe, 

 the Cymry from the region of the Alps and the Gadhelic branch 

 from the valleys of the Rhine and the Moselle. It would be after 

 their plundering of Rome that they broke in upon Greece, crossed 

 the Bosphorus and settled in Asia Minor, to which they gave the 

 name of Galatia, where they long retained their Celtic speech, and 

 the ethical peculiarities of their (our) Celtic blood. (Vide St. Paul's 

 Epistle). 



The accumulative evidence furnished by these Celtic names has 

 been exhibited in a very imperfect manner, but enough has probably 

 been adduced to show conclusively that large portions of Italy, 

 Spain, France, Switzerland, and Germany, were at some period in- 

 habited by the race which now retains its speech and its nationality 

 only in a few of the western corners of Europe — Ireland, the Scotch 

 Highlands, the Isle of Man, Wales, and Brittany. 



One conclusion that strikes us in running over the place names 

 of Western Europe is that the simple-minded children of semi- 

 barbarous times have unconsciously conformed to the natural laws 

 which regulate the bestowal of names, and adorned our maps with 

 a terminology that for beauty, poetry and directness, no academy 

 of modern savants could approach. What a contrast is presented by 

 the New World, settled, not by savages, but by civilized men, where 

 a large proportion of the names are unfortunately thoroughly bar- 

 barous in character ! We find the map of the United States and even 

 (though in a lesser degree) that of Canada, thickly bespattered with 

 an incongruous medley of names, for the most part utterly inappro- 

 priate, and fulfilling very insufficiently the chief purposes which 

 names are intended to fulfil. What poverty of the inventive faculty 

 is evinced by such unmeaning names as Cairo, Troy, Rome, Paris, 

 Athens ! 



A regeneration ought to be effected in this country in the prac- 

 tice of name-giving. Names, whether they be Indian, English or 

 French, ought to be at once harmonious, distinctive, characteristic, 

 and in entire consonance with the genius and the composition of the 

 nation. In short, if this article could induce some of our modern 

 godfathers to revert, in naming our new settlements, to the antique 

 method of their ancestors of the stone age, we would consider our 

 pains amply rewarded. J. M. Lanos. 



